{"author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich","total_quotes":52,"quotes":[{"text":"In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["feminism","puberty"],"id":34204,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["shame"],"id":34978,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["friends","great","free "],"id":54397,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["education","enlightenment","universe"],"id":60409,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: 'What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["breast-cancer","cancer","clinical-oncology","immune-system","medicine","oncology","positive-thinking","psychology"],"id":79245,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the 'laws.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["animism","physics","world"],"id":84396,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"In fact the 'mask' theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in 'The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism', and Robert Jackall, in 'Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers', refer repeatedly to the 'masks' that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to 'get in the face' of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["capitalism","corporate-culture","corporate-world","drama","fake","faking","mask","masks","moral","morality","phony","self-control","smile","smiling","theatre"],"id":93745,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["empiricism","enlightenment"],"id":94364,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["positive-thinking"],"id":106676,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["motherhood","thought","moral "],"id":111327,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":52,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}